The invention relates to a health booth for obtaining measurements establishing the health of a user or of a population.
Establishing a person's health requires a number of measurements (weight, heart rate, temperature, etc.) to be taken under the supervision of medical personnel.
These measurements must sometimes be repeated at regular intervals to track how they change over time.
The obligatory presence of health personnel causes a number of problems.
First of all, it is clear that in developing countries, where the density of health personnel is low, it is difficult to conduct a health campaign, especially in an emergency, where there is an epidemiological risk present.
In other regions, the main impediment to health screening individually or collectively on a large scale is the relatively high cost of the presence of the above-mentioned health personnel.
To limit the above-mentioned problems, there are known, in particular from the document U.S. Pat. No. 5,544,649, “telemedicine” methods in which patients communicate with a doctor or other health personnel remotely, via a telecommunications network, the patients themselves effecting a number of measurements that are sent to the doctor via the network.
It should be noted that those solutions are not really satisfactory since they require the presence of health personnel when the measurements are taken, even though at a remote location.
One solution that springs naturally to mind would be to have patients take the measurements themselves, for example at home, with no contact with medical personnel, and then send the measurements to a remote center for subsequent processing.
However, it is difficult to envisage such a procedure since it is known that medical measurements are strongly linked to the conditions under which they are taken, in particular the patient's stress or fatigue and the meteorological, sound, and light environment at the time of taking the measurements.
In other words, if this information is not known, the measurements cannot be used by a doctor with sufficient reliability.